First off, how do millions of disparate tweets turn into a happiness barometer?

The researchers coded 10 million geotagged tweets gathered from 373 urban areas in the contiguous United States during the calendar year 2011 for their happiness content, based on the appearance and frequency of words determined by Mechanical Turk workers to be happy (rainbow, love, beauty, hope, wonderful, wine) or sad (damn, boo, ugly, smoke, hate, lied).

Here’s a look at the coding (cue the eye glaze):

The results? Check it out:

As The Atlantic notes, dissecting this study, many people vacation in Napa (the top city) and Hawaii (the stop state). That could skew the results. But that being said, cities (Longmont, Green Bay, Spokane, San Jose) and states (Idaho, Maine, Washington) farther down the list that are not year-round tourism hot spots still score high on the hedonometer.

Also, the study does not examine tweets in any language other than English, which excludes many communities across the country. And what about the difference in context for how people discuss happiness, especially over social media? Cultures can vary widely when it comes to the private vs. public sharing of emotion.